TCEC Kibitzer

If you're a fun of computer chess tournaments like me, then you've probably heard of TCEC or T horesen C hess E ngines C ompetition which is a live chess tournament organized and maintained by Martin Thoresen in cooperation with Chessdom Arena. Check out the TCEC Live Website here.

TCEC Kibitzer is a set of tools that can be used to help you analyze the current chess game running at TCEC in realtime using your own computer running a UCI chess engine in the background. The analysis is then displayed on a semitransparent window directly on the TCEC live page website.

OVERVIEW

The whole setup involves:

1. A google-chrome extension.
2. A web service running in the background. (Using Python/Flask)
3. Of course your UCI Chess engine.

HOW IT WORKS

1. The Google Chrome extension is used to directly display information from your UCI chess engine. It displays information such as depth, seldepth, Principle variation etc.

2. The Web Service (written in Python) is used to send and receive information between our google-chrome extension and our loaded UCI chess engine through a http port running on your computer (127.0.0.1:2035) Its possible to run web service from a remote machine host. (But this has not been tested)

3. The UCI chess engine will of course do the hard work of analysing the chess positions it gets from the live web page (through the Web Service). The information will then be sent back to the browser extension.

REQUIREMENTS

• Windows, Mac or Linux Box
• Python & Flask (python Module)
• Google Chrome web browser. (Currently the only supported Web browser)

INSTALLATION

1. Clone or download this repository into your machine.

2. Install the Google Chrome extension.

   • You will need to open Google Chrome web browser and browse to the url chrome://extensions chrome://extensions
   • Make sure you enable developer mode in Google Chrome Chrome extensions settings. This will now allow you to Load unpacked extension.
   • Then click on Load unpacked extension button and browse to the sub-folder Chrome of tcec-kibitzer (Its in this repo that you've just downloaded).
   • You should now see a freshly installed Chrome extension called TCEC Kibitzer

3. Install Python and Flask. (Preferably python version 2.7 or above).

   • On linux, python is probably available from your distribution's package manager.
   • For Windows & Mac, check out This Link to get started.

   In addition to Python, you will need to install Flask which is the microframework for Python that we will use for the Web Service. If Python is correctly installed, you can add its location to your enviroment path, then you can install Flask from terminal/cmd with the command:

 pip install Flask

USAGE

Once you have the above 3 requirements installed, Configure your Engines then start the Web Service which by default will run on localhost port 2035

• open terminal window in the api folder path
• running the command

Assuming python is in your environment path

python api.py

With your google chrome browser, navigate to TCEC Live Website

If all went well, you will see a new semitransparent window at the bottom right side of the page. Here you will be able to choose your configured engine to analyze the current position on the board.

Quick Hint: Click on the title TCEC Kibitzer to switch between minimalistic and full view.

DOCUMENTATION

• API Docs
• Browser addon Docs

####Issues

Discovered a bug? Please create an issue here on GitHub!

TERMS OF USE

Use as you please. TCEC Kibitzer is not affiliated with TCEC in any way.

CREDITS

The API makes use of ChessBoard.py by John Eriksson

LICENSE

TCEC KIBITZER is free, and distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv3).

Checkout LICENSE.txt